Exploring the archetype of La Huesera, the Bone Woman: a SoulCollage® experience
Recently, in an Interspiritual Counseling class at One Spirit Learning Alliance, I had a powerful experience, which I have decided to share via this blog post. For this experience, we were presented with two powerful SoulCollage® cards, one representing an indigenous elder, and the other, a majestic wolf. After a short meditation on the archetype of La Loba, the Wolf Woman, we were invited to write a reflection in response to the SoulCollage® prompt, “I am the one who…” In SoulCollage®, the central energy (or “neter”) of a card is seen as representing one fractal, one part-personality, of our unique soul. So, although the entire class saw the same images, how the energy of those images lives in each of us, is expected to be unique. For a more detailed description of SoulCollage® process, please click here.
The Wolf Woman is a powerful archetypal image, created by the master Jungian analyst, artist and poet, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in her book, Women Who Run with the Wolves. Describing this archetype in her book, Estés says, “…she is called by many names: La Huesera, Bone Woman; La Trapera, The Gatherer; and La Loba, Wolf Woman.”
I have always been drawn to the manifestation of this archetype as the Bone Woman, La Huesera. So, I chose to work with this image during class. A couple of days after the class, I decided to travel deeper into the archetype, by making my own SoulCollage® card of La Huesera.
Below is a photograph of my SoulCollage® card, and my exercise of “circumambulating” the image of La Huesera, starting with the prompt, “I am the one who…”
Circumambulation (sometimes referred to as “amplification”) is a Jungian methodology of working with images. It invites us to look at an image from many different perspectives, but always coming back to the original image. We literally “circum-ambulate” (go around) the image, just like one would circumambulate a temple, shrine or sanctuary. The goal is to never lose sight of the central image, which constitutes the focal point of the circumambulation. In this sense, this method is different from the more well-known Freudian technique of “free association.” In free association, an image is used as a take-off point, and then the associative thread is followed to wherever it will lead. Each method has its own strength and power. What follows below may be most accurately described as a hybrid between the two techniques!
My SoulCollage® experience with La Huesera, the Bone Woman
My SoulCollage® card
My SoulCollage® card entitled “La Huesera: the Bone Woman.” The inspiration for this card is the archetypal image from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s book, Women Who Run with the Wolves. (See below for excerpt.)
The collage above was created by me, using some of my original photographs and some photograph parts cut out of magazines and other sources. I gratefully acknowledge the artists and photographers whose work has made this collage possible.
My “I am the One who” Reflection
I am the one who is the elder of the clan.
I am La Huasera, the Bone Woman. La Trapera, the Gathering Woman.
I am the grandmother who has known of bones being broken - lost, buried. My own bones. And the bones of the women, five generations before and five generations forward. I have known of the bones of the wolves, lost through deforestation, drought, fire, and loss of habitat. The bones of wolves lost through human hubris.
I gather the bones. Painstakingly. One by one. I sing over the bones. I drum over the bones. I whistle over the bones. I rattle over the bones. I howl over the indignity of the scattered bones of my ancestors.
In my intensity of consciousness, I create the heat that transmutes what was broken, what was lost, what was shamed.
The vibrations of my song bring alive what was believed to be dead.
I am not a healer. I am an alchemical transmuter.
I transmute lead into gold. But even more importantly, I transmute gold back to lead, so a new cycle may begin.
My blessing to you is not one of healing, but one of remaining open to the circle of existence. To the inter-dependent and inter-transmuting web of life.
I am not only the Bone Woman. I am also the Spider Woman. I am the one who weaves back the fabric that was ripped in places through human folly.
I am not just nice and loving and supporting. I am also the unwavering witness to human foibles, and the suffering that humans bring upon themselves, each other and upon all other beings they come in contact with.
I am the holder, gatherer and weaver of all there is.
~~~
I find it intriguing that even though I wrote the “I am one who” reflection from the voice of La Huesera, she is in fact absent on my card. To me, it feels as if the card represents her work, her sacred altar. The young woman in the card appears to be the “laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon” (see excerpt below). But La Huesera herself stands behind the veil.
I am sitting with what that means for me at this time. My sense is that she is not yet ready to reveal herself to me in manifest form. Indeed, I have never come across an image to date that fully captures how she is described by Dr. Estés in the passage excerpted below. It is very likely that she will show up in manifest form - as an image, or a collection of images - when she deems the time to be right! Indeed, my ego is incapable of “making her appear” on demand!
For now, she stands beyond my conception of Space and Time, and teaches from that realm.
The original text from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
(and audio recorded in my voice)
(Excerpt from Women who Run with the Wolves, pages 22-24, Kindle Edition)
There is an old woman who lives in a hidden place that everyone knows but few have ever seen. As in the fairy tales of Eastern Europe, she seems to wait for lost or wandering people and seekers to come to her place.
She is circumspect, often hairy, always fat, and especially wishes to evade most company. She is both a crower and a cackler, generally having more animal sounds than human ones.
They say she lives among the rotten granite slopes in Tarahumara Indian territory. They say she is buried outside Phoenix near a well. She is said to have been seen travelling south to Monte Alban in a burnt-out car with the back window shot out. She is said to stand by the highway near El Paso, or ride shotgun with truckers to Morelia, Mexico, or that she has been sighted walking to market above Oaxaca with strangely formed boughs of firewood on her back. She is called by many names: La Huesera, Bone Woman; La Trapera, The Gatherer; and La Loba, Wolf Woman.
The sole work of La Loba is the collecting of bones. She is known to collect and preserve especially that which is in danger of being lost to the world. Her cave is filled with the bones of all manner of desert creatures: the deer, the rattlesnake, the crow. But her speciality is said to be wolves.
She creeps and crawls and sifts through the montañas, mountains, and arroyos, dry riverbeds, looking for wolf bones, and when she has assembled an entire skeleton, when the last bone is in place and the beautiful white sculpture of the creature is laid out before her, she sits by the fire and thinks about what song she will sing.
And when she is sure, she stands over the criatura, raises her arms over it, and sings out. That is when the rib bones and leg bones of the wolf begin to flesh out and the creature becomes furred. La Loba sings some more, and more of the creature comes into being; its tail curls upward, shaggy and strong.
And La Loba sings more and the wolf creature begins to breathe.
And still La Loba sings so deeply that the floor of the desert shakes, and as she sings, the wolf opens its eyes, leaps up, and runs away down the canyon.
Somewhere in its running, whether by the speed of its running, or by splashing its way into a river, or by way of a ray of sunlight or moonlight hitting it right in the side, the wolf is suddenly transformed into a laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon.
So it is said that if you wander the desert, and it is near sundown, and you are perhaps a little bit lost, and certainly tired, that you are lucky, for La Loba may take a liking to you and show you something—something of the soul.